Chances are that you've seen the following happen more than once: A colleague builds a beautiful case to support his recommendation. Then comes the relentless questioner who pummels him with questions that seem to have nothing to do with the core case, and the colleague limps to a close as if he'd been attacked by war planes rather than stung by a B-B gun. If you haven't experienced this in real life, you've certainly seen it on TV press conferences. People ask hostile questions for any number of reasons:...

More and more people are trying to use iPads during their sales meetings, but often get stuck with just email, CRM, and maybe a brochure or PDF presentation, none of which is really going to rock your audience's world. So, to change all that, we're going to run down a list of some of the best apps to use to help you revolutionize the way that you conduct sales meetings, with the iPad playing an integral part in the conversation. Sadly,...

Last week I received a call from a sales manager whose team we worked with last year. He wanted a presentation skills "refresher" for his salespeople because their presentations were getting "sloppy" again. These were the same salespeople who did extremely well during our training class one year ago, but over the months they had gradually slid back into old habits. Granted, they were still "pretty good" in terms of their skills. But the manager wanted them to be great again. While this is certainly frustrating for the sales manager, it is understandable. After all,...

Every few weeks, someone speaks out on a public forum somewhere about how bad PowerPoint is. About how it should be eliminated from corporate culture. About how it is the root of all evil. Over on the Presentation Gurus LinkedIn group, one of the regular contributors, Eric Bergman, shared a link to an NPR article entitled "Physicists, Generals and CEOs Agree: Ditch the PowerPoint." The article describes how...

Could you persuade someone to donate a quarter of a million dollars in 120 seconds? Last year one of our clients was in this situation. He shared his story with me last week while I was leading a workshop for his nonprofit staff. Here's the backstory. The nonprofit director was rejected multiple times by this prospective donor, a local senior business executive. Not just rejected, but he was told very frankly by the executive that meeting was a waste of time. With persistence, the nonprofit director sent out a final Hail Mary:...

So here's the setting: Standing in the wings, a nervous entrepreneur has an idea. And it's not that they're just looking at it as a quick path to personal wealth. It also seems a part of their DNA - to create something from nothing. But they have a problem. Not enough cash to make their dream a reality and they need to get more of the stuff from probably the most intimidating audience they'll ever encounter: venture capitalists. You see, those investors' motivation is rarely altruistic. It has everything to do with making money...lots of it and with deal leverage that feels like your children, dog and golf clubs may be included. What I'm describing here is one of the most highly-rated TV shows going, The Shark Tank. So let's see if we have our arms around this high-pressure presentation scenario:...

Have you ever found yourself sitting in the center seat of a packed auditorium-hemmed in on both sides by people and laptops-listening to a keynote speaker who is supposed to be imparting knowledge and wisdom, but instead is droning on and on? You want to run, but you can't. So you endure what seems like torture. You probably think this only happens in large university lecture halls, right?...

In a recent blog post I discussed a study that showed that we leak our stress levels to other people. As I pointed out, if stress is contagious and we leak our emotions, then speakers need to concern themselves with their emotional states before and during their speeches. A stressed-out speaker will induce stress in the audience. Imagine what that does for communication. When we're stressed,...

PowerPoint 2010 has a new feature that's very hard to find, but that people are praising over and over. It's called Custom Shapes, and it's a set of four tools that you can use to create your very own shapes. Why do you need Custom Shapes?...

Last year I created an online tool to calculate the sizes of two shapes based on values that you input. This allows you to create a diagram with two proportional shapes (see below). I wrote about this calculator in an issue of my newsletter and gave examples of the background and other links about this type of diagram...